The Truth Seeker / Author Margo Perin's quest to find out what made her father a criminal led her to County Jail to teach inmates to write their way out of trouble

Stephanie Losee

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4:00 am PDT, Sunday, April 30, 2006

margo_249_cs.jpg Event on 3/23/06 in San Bruno. Inmate Andre Harris, 50, listens attentively during Margo Perin's creative writing class at the SF County Jail in San Bruno. Chris Stewart / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT less

margo_249_cs.jpg Event on 3/23/06 in San Bruno. Inmate Andre Harris, 50, listens attentively during Margo Perin's creative writing class at the SF County Jail in San Bruno. Chris Stewart / The Chronicle ... more

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margo_249_cs.jpg Event on 3/23/06 in San Bruno. Inmate Andre Harris, 50, listens attentively during Margo Perin's creative writing class at the SF County Jail in San Bruno. Chris Stewart / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT less

margo_249_cs.jpg Event on 3/23/06 in San Bruno. Inmate Andre Harris, 50, listens attentively during Margo Perin's creative writing class at the SF County Jail in San Bruno. Chris Stewart / The Chronicle ... more

The Truth Seeker / Author Margo Perin's quest to find out what made her father a criminal led her to County Jail to teach inmates to write their way out of trouble

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When Bay Area writer and teacher Margo Perin was 4, she came home from nursery school to discover her family had moved. She opened the door of her Manhattan apartment to find it empty save for a single wooden stool. Seated there, facing away from her, was a fat man with hairy elbows whom Perin imagined to be the bogeyman her mother had warned her about. She ran downstairs and screamed until she saw the man coming down to her. He was her father's friend Wally, whom she knew and liked.

"Didn't Mommy tell you about moving today?" he asked. "Didn't you know that was me up there?" Perin shook her head. "I guess Mommy forgot to tell you," the man said kindly, taking her hand.

The move was only the first of many Perin's parents "forgot" to mention to her. When she was 7, Perin's father, Arden Perin, who had been jailed several times, heard he would be investigated for his participation in an investment heist that made the pages of the Wall Street Journal in 1962. On the run from the authorities and a variety of "business associates" -- it was never clear whom Perin feared more -- he moved his wife and seven children from New York to Cuernavaca, Mexico; Nassau, Bahamas; Jacksonville; Miami Beach; New York again; Helensburgh, Scotland; Glasgow, Scotland; and London, changing the spelling of their last name and telling his children nothing about who he was, what he had done or what they were running from. If they asked too many questions, he told them lies or beat them.

Yet when Perin, a Pushcart Prize nominee and editor of the 2004 anthology "How I Learned to Cook and Other Writings on Complex Mother-Daughter Relationships" (Tarcher/Penguin), found herself wanting to teach writing in the San Francisco County Jail some 30 years later, it wasn't clear to her where her desire came from. "I thought it was because I knew people in jail were very oppressed, and I wanted to go in for political reasons," Perin says. "I knew the power of writing because I knew what it had done for me, so helping people find liberation through writing was important to me."

It wasn't until she had worked for a year with the revolving door of inmates in San Bruno -- most of whom are in the county jail system because they are either awaiting sentencing or serving sentences of less than one year -- that Perin made the connection Freud would have spotted within seconds.

"A lot of people in jail are con men and my father was a con man," she says. "My father never allowed me to know him -- he wiped our past clean from the moment we fled the U.S. when I was 7. But my inmate students allow me to see who they are on the inside and it helps me to break through the illusion of his glamour and confront how abusive he really was."

Perin's father is still on the run today. She doesn't know where he is or whether he is alive. Her last communication with him was via phone in 1989 when she told him how much she loved him. He replied, "To tell you the truth, Margo, I care more about the students in Tiananmen Square than I do about you."

Perin's relationship with crime and criminals and her passion for turning it into art is what earned her a grant to publish "Only the Dead Can Kill," a multimedia project that includes an anthology of stories and poems from Perin and her students in the jail, along with a CD of their spoken works. The title refers to the concept that people in pain sometimes protect themselves by shutting off their humanity, making them capable of grave harm.

The grant for "Only the Dead Can Kill" comes from the Creative Work Fund, a Bay Area program that gives support to artists who want to do collaborative projects that benefit the community. Creative Work Fund grant recipients must work with an established nonprofit -- in Perin's case it's Community Works, an organization that brings arts and education programs to Bay Area populations who come in contact with the criminal justice system. The book and CD were released April 23, and the ex-offenders who contributed to it will give a reading with Perin on Saturday at the San Francisco Library's Koret Auditorium.

The County Jail's San Bruno facility consists of a motley arrangement of buildings off Skyline Drive: the 1937 "old jail," a traditional tiered structure, and the glittering and empty "new jail," begun in 2001 and never used because of structural problems. Behind the new facility is County Jail 7, which contains the so-called dorms -- six large rooms housing men who have agreed to participate in drug, alcohol or violence-prevention programs. Inmates can also work toward a high school diploma or attend electives such as Perin's twice-weekly writing class.

Perin started the class I observed with an impromptu writing assignment. "Describe a negative or painful experience, especially one that has happened to you more than once, and tell what you learned from it or what you think you could learn from it." The students -- wearing orange T-shirts and pants that looked like hospital scrubs, many with black flip-flops and orange socks on their feet -- stared at her, stumped, and asked for an example. Perin described her battles with illness -- she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease when she was 19 and breast cancer a few years ago -- and the way that having her defenses down has helped her get closer to understanding her feelings. She looked small and vulnerable at the front of the classroom full of orange men. Perin has a mass of brown curls and wears no makeup; she is 51 and looks much younger except for her drawn and delicate neck -- a result of her Hodgkin's treatments -- which she covers with a wardrobe of colorful scarves. The inmates treat her protectively and respectfully, as if she were their younger sister.

After they had worked for several minutes, Perin asked the inmates to read aloud what they had just written. A full-lipped, handsome young white man with short-cropped brown hair tried not to meet Perin's eye. She called on him to stand before the class and he agreed reluctantly, reading so fast we could barely separate the words:

"What can I say about the experiences in my life where a lesson should have been learned, something beneficial should have come out of it. After all the strenuous experiences in my life I should possess a great deal of wisdom, wisdom that is granted to the unfortunate few who have traveled down a path wrought with every dark emotion there is and can now tread down a different route for fear of succumbing to the pain they had traveled with before. Yet I feel no such wisdom, I find myself trapped within the walls of repetition, becoming complacent with what has become of me, what will become of me and where I will finally wind up. Trapped in a fog of blissful ignorance, when will I find myself, how many more experiences do I need?"

The group applauded, and Perin made him read the piece aloud again more slowly to make sure the group could appreciate it. The praise didn't seem to comfort him. He returned to his seat. When we spoke after class he said his name was Brian, he was 21 and was serving a six-month sentence for selling drugs. He had taken writing courses at San Francisco State University and had wanted to become a journalist before his first conviction.

An older African American man with a gentle manner stood up to read in a soft, breathy voice. He said he had hit the women in his life over and over without ever making the connection between his own behavior and what he witnessed as a child watching his father beat his mother.

"I was expelled from the public schools in Rockford, Ill. in December of '71. My mother held a standard that no one would live under her household unless they were going to school or working. This non-negotiable rule, along with the school board, forced me to attend continuation school. A school designed for juvenile delinquents bound for prison, not a diploma, according to statistics.

"As my mother by my side sat in front of the school board, her eyes watered as sadness took over her dream of me becoming a doctor or lawyer. I can't imagine how much hurt and disappointment she must have felt, because my sense of empathy had been numbed through years of failures and letdowns. A few days after that horrible board meeting, I stood at the store in front of the reddish brick building where I would continue my education of delinquency."

His name was Lee and he had served 18 months so far on a domestic-violence charge without having been sentenced. "The first class, Margo had me writing my autobiography in 20 minutes and something came alive in me," Lee said. When new inmates join the class, Perin starts them off with this assignment, asking them to use a comma every time they want to put in a period in order to free up the material.

"It's been healing to me to write my story. I feel I have a place in life now, when before I thought of myself as a person who lives to die one day," Lee said.

"I've been a woman abuser since 16 years old -- my father was one and his was one. I want to be the one who breaks the cycle. Today I can say I don't feel the need for drugs or self-destructive behaviors. Writing is where my rebirth started," Lee added. He never wrote before taking Perin's class; now he's written 150 pages of a memoir about his childhood in Rockford.

Perin has found similar transformations often happen in her classes, but when her students are released she frequently has trouble reaching them to invite them to participate in readings. At two ex-offender readings I attended, Perin had contacted nine or 10 writers and was pleased to see three show up. At one reading, Perin asked students from her other workshops to take the podium and read the work of the ex-cons. "Some of them are lucky enough to get out, but then they're released to what?" Perin says. "The basic reasons people commit crimes are not dealt with, so soon they're back to using or selling drugs and they don't want me to see them like that."

When they avoid this fate, Perin's students often attribute their success to their new identities as writers. Greg Carter, 44, was sent to County Jail after completing a sentence in San Quentin because of an old warrant that took six weeks to straighten out. "I went to her class basically out of boredom and there's this tiny little powerhouse who left us no room to do anything but what we were supposed to do. I've never seen anybody be able to do that before in that atmosphere," Carter says.

"She gets you to realize real quick that you can function in a classroom setting, that you really can do what other people can do. We're basically a bunch of big kids with bad habits, and we end up in the places that we end up mainly because we don't know what we're capable of," he says.

"You can get someone to stop what they're doing with drugs or gambling, but if you're not putting something positive in place of that, it's just a matter of time before they go back to doing what they were doing. I'm getting off parole in July, I never violated, and when I started getting discouraged, I remembered Margo believed in us when we believed in nothing," Carter says. "She has this way about her that says, 'You're not a piece of junk, so quit acting like it.' "

Greg Carter hasn't returned to jail since his release in 2003; his poetry appears in "Only the Dead Can Kill." His story is unusual; a great many ex-offenders commit new crimes and return to jail within a few months.

It is for this reason that Perin agreed to participate in this article only on the condition that no details of her personal life be given that could identify her partner or her home, beyond the fact that she has never been married or had children, lives in San Francisco and is in a long-term relationship. "I feel very close to my students," Perin says. "But they are people who take drugs and commit crimes, and I have to protect myself."

Perin is not thinking of her father when she talks about protecting herself, but she is the only one in her family who isn't afraid. The only sibling who will speak on record is a sister who says, "I don't feel comfortable talking about my father, but everything Margo says about our childhood is true." In her nonfiction Perin goes by her given name but shields her siblings by using pseudonyms that conform to the erratic naming scheme her parents chose -- one child after a queen of England, one after an opera heroine, two after characters in a British children's story and so on. Her siblings feel their fear is well-justified, even after all these years. Once their father had all of the bones in his face broken and another time came home with two black thumbs.

The sister I contacted is named after a communist revolutionary -- her name is tied to a bizarre episode that made the front page of the New York Times in 1951. "Ex-Red Now Shocked" the headline reads. "Back From Behind Iron Curtain, He Regrets Leaving U.S." Perin's father had attempted to emigrate to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia with his wife and daughter and been denied entry, suspected of being a spy. "I am disillusioned and I am no longer a Communist," he declared. Apparently he decided that if he couldn't escape capitalism, he'd embrace it, however illicitly. He appears to have been a front man for a criminal organization, selling first stocks and then insurance policies that didn't exist, among other schemes. The family was alternately so wealthy that they lived in a mansion in Surrey, England, and so poor that they couldn't afford medical care for one of Perin's brothers when he was in a car accident in Miami.

Bits of objective evidence such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times stories are all Perin has to piece together her past, carefully hidden by her parents. "They changed their birthdays, their religion, my mother's maiden name, our last name and cut us off from all family," Perin says. When she was 13 her father forced her to undergo a nose job to hide the family's Jewishness, dropping her off at a hospital in London during a "business" trip and leaving her to endure the procedure alone while he flew back home to Glasgow.

"I didn't know what it was about," Perin says now. "It's very painful to me still. The message I got was I was very ugly and I was being punished."

Perin left home at 16. When she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's three years later, she called her mother from the hospital to tell her that the doctor had found tumors. Perin asked if she could visit. "No," her mother replied, cold as ever. "I think it's better for you to go home."

Knowing her history, Perin's peers wonder how it is she ended up as the gentle nurturer of so many people, broken and otherwise. Besides her classes at the jail, she has taught writing workshops privately and at a number of universities. She has also edited other writers' work for years. "She's the daughter of two sociopaths," says Susanne Pari, author of "The Fortune Catcher." "What happens to the kids of sociopaths, how do they learn empathy? Shouldn't they not learn empathy? Maybe it's part of the genetic code, because Margo has."

Bill Eisele, author of "Scrub Match," based his book on a character sketch he wrote in one of Perin's classes and credits her with helping him to become a published author. "The positive reinforcement that I got in those workshops was so critical to me when I was trying to decide whether to write the novel. She took our work very seriously and put a lot of thought into her feedback, so even if there wasn't much there to start with she would help to make it into more and help you push it to the next level," Eisele says.

Perin feels as if the writers she's taught -- the inmates in particular -- have had as much of an effect on her work. As a result of making the connection between her work with inmates and her quest to understand her father, she applied for and received a cultural equity grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission to write a memoir interweaving her experiences teaching in the jail with her childhood. The grant will pay her to write the book, scheduled for completion in February.

"I kept trying to write about my father, but it was only by working in the jail that I was able to write about him," Perin explains. "With the inmates I feel like I'm understood emotionally in a way I'm not by my peers. They understand suffering, familial abuse and chaos. They understand what it is to live without a safety net."

One of the phrases Perin's students often repeat is "hurt people hurt people," and the fact that Perin does the opposite is what is most surprising. Says Perin's longtime partner: "I think Margo's most magnificent beauty is that she does transform pain into healing. She has a commitment to telling and shedding light on one's truth, which is something her parents tried to steal from her."

Despite the threats, the beatings and the horror of leaving their 4-year-old to come home to an empty room, they failed.